Leader: Microsoft 

Microsoft won the gold medal for vision and ranks second for execution on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. Microsoft’s Azure AI platform has a comprehensive offering for all three use cases: language, vision and automated ML. Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft leads the industry by responding to market demands faster than its competitors, building a compelling business model and structuring a tiered pricing model that encourages enterprises of all sizes to build AI-powered applications.

Strength:  Microsoft offers a free version of Azure AI, a pay-as-you-go tier for small teams, and discounted subscription plans for enterprises. Microsoft offers its automated ML capabilities for free, charging only for compute and storage. It also employs AI solution architects as part of its sales team.

Weakness: Microsoft’s SLAs do not guarantee latency limits for cloud AI developer services. Gartner said this can be problematic when these services are embedded in mission-critical applications and when the workloads are computationally expensive.